Archive for the ‘Islam’ Category

One of the scandals of the Nazi regime was that the churches, who should have led the opposition to Nazism, did far too little to resist. And quite often the resistance that was offered was simply to preserve their own freedom against the demands and attempts at coordination by the Nazi state. Nevertheless, there were many heroic Christian clergy and lay people, who did resist Nazism, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who declared Hitler the Anti-Christ. 400 Lutheran pastors paid for their opposition by being murdered in Buchenwald concentration camp. The Nazis also devised a special emblem to be worn by Christian opponents of Nazis – Bibelforscher, ‘Bible Students’, as they were dubbed. This was a purple triangle, like the pink triangle worn by gay men and the black triangle of the ‘asocial’ and ‘workshy’. Most of those interned were Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refused to accept Hitler as a ‘secular messiah’.

In June 1936 the Confessional Church – a Lutheran organisation that had split off from the official National Church – issued the Barmen Memorandum attacking not only Nazi anti-clericalism, but also Nazi ideology, racial anti-Semitism, the perverted judicial system and the concentration camps. Some of those who signed it, including the head of the Confessional Church Friedrich Weissler, were imprisoned and executed. Seven years later, in October 1943, the Prussian Confessional Synod at Breslau denounced the Nazi extermination policy as unchristian. They declared

Concepts such as “rooting out”, “liquidation” and “unworthy life” are not known to the Divine order. The extermination of people solely because they are related to a criminal, or old or mentally disturbed or belong to an alien race is not a sword to be wielded by the state.’ This included ‘the life of the people of Israel’. Moreover, claiming that you were merely acting on orders was no defence: ‘We cannot permit superiors to relieve us of our responsibility before God.’

James Taylor and Warren Shaw, A Dictionary of the Third Reich (London: Grafton Books 1987) 88.

I’m putting this up because the extreme Right in America and Europe is trying to justify its demands for the persecution of Muslims and their forcible removal or mass murder as the necessary defence of Europe’s Judaeo-Christian and secular, enlightenment heritage. The Nazis despise the Enlightenment and its doctrines of tolerance, humanity and the brotherhood of nations, which should serve as a warning to anyone who believes they can adopt their policies to defend it. And while many Nazis were Christians, and were supported by anti-Semites within the churches and wider German and European society, others like Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis official ideologue, and Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, were fervently anti-Christian. Hitler himself was a pantheist. He had been raised a Catholic, but had very much turned against his upbringing. In his Table Talk he freely describes how unimpressed he was with his RE teacher at school, how since he was 12 years old he wanted to blow the Catholic mass up with dynamite, and how the Reich should found astronomical observatories all over Germany as part of a campaign to destroy Christianity. And one of the reasons the mainstream churches are uniting with Muslims to denounce the massacre in New Zealand is because of memories of the Third Reich, and the churches’ collaboration with the Nazis, as well as other atrocities committed through history in the name of religion.

The Barmen Memorandum and the 1943 condemnation of Nazism by the Breslau Confessional Church not just condemn Nazism, but also anyone else who seeks to exterminate other innocent people simply because they are of a different race or ethnicity. And that includes modern Western racial terrorists of the Nazi, Alt Right, or racial populist fringe, such as New Zealand murderer.

This fortnight’s edition of Private Eye contains yet another piece by ‘Ratbiter’ promoting the fake story that Corbyn’s Labour party is just one seething mass of anti-Semites, and making these allegations against a couple of people in particular. I’ll blog about these latest claims in due course, as they’re very similar to the accusations used against others like Mike, who are very definitely not anti-Semites.

‘Ratbiter’ is the pseudonym used by Guardian/ Observer journalist Nick Cohen. According to a piece Tony Greenstein put up on his blog in October last year, 2018, Cohen at one time used to be a respectable journalist. He started writing for the Groan /Absurder during Blair’s tenure of No.10, but what actually respectable. He defended immigrants and asylum seekers against Blair’s attempts to demonise them and tighten up the anti-immigration legislation. And then along came 9/11, and he became a determined critic of Islam and a fervent supporter of Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq. Greenstein described this part of his journalistic career in a piece he put up defending Jon Lansman, the head of Momentum, who seems to believe the anti-Semitism smears. Cohen had attacked him for not doing enough to purge the organisation of Greenstein himself. Here’s how Greenstein described Cohen and his turn to the Right.

But first let me digress. There was a time, at the beginning of the Blair government, when Nick Cohen was a decent journalist. I even looked forward to reading his column in The Observer. No one was a more indefatiguable defender of asylum seekers from the depredations of a racist New Labour government than Cohen. Cohen was a mainstream Tribune style journalist.

Then something happened. As with Christopher Hitchens it was 9/11 and then the war with Iraq. From being a left-wing journalist Cohen became transformed into an anti-Muslim bigot. No one, not even David Aaronovitch, banged the war drum more assiduously than Cohen. He did it, he said, in support of his anti-Baathist Iraqi friends, seemingly oblivious to the hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq, the murderous rampages of American troops, the torture centres and the deliberate policy of setting Shi’ites against Sunnis with all the devastatingly sectarian consequences that followed. To Cohen Iraq was a holy war and unlike Aaronovitch he never publicly recanted (Aaro promised to eat his hat, although to my knowledge this never happened).

Instead Cohen became one of the authors and founders of the short-lived Euston Manifesto group of neo-cons and imperialists. For him opposition to war meant you were inextricably intertwined with Islamic fundamentalism and inherently anti-Semitic. Naturally when Jeremy Corbyn came along Cohen joined the rest of the chorus at the Guardian/Observer in his ceaseless attacks on Labour’s most radical and left-wing leader ever. Nothing was too dirty or discredited to attack Corbyn with but it is nonetheless worth remembering that once upon a time Nick Cohen was a decent and genuine journalist.

Today Cohen operates under the pseudonym of ratbiter at Private Eye, acting as a conduit for whatever misinformation about the Left that the Right supplies him with. It is an appropriate name as his journalism, if that’s the right word, is certainly verminous. In this capacity he has written a series of attacks on Momentum’s Left in Brighton and in particular on my friend and comrade Greg Hadfield.

Greenstein then turns to taking apart the lies, smears and inaccuracies Cohen has made against the Momentum left in Brighton in that fortnight’s issue of Private Eye in a piece entitled ‘The New Nasty Party’. And he also reveals another magazine Cohen writes for: The Speccie. Greenstein writes

As befits a good socialist, not only does Nick Cohen write in Private Eye but he is a columnist at that well known socialist weeklyThe Spectator.And there it was that he attacked poor Lansman for not doing enough in the fight against ‘anti-Semitism’. Cohen starts off his column with the brainless comment that‘being a Jew on the Corbyn left is soul crushing.’

Greenstein also add the remark that he was tempted to ask Cohen how he would know, as Cohen isn’t actually Jewish. He then goes on to attack the inaccuracies in another, previous article Cohen had written, and a piece on his blog. After describing this lies and inaccuracies, Greenstein concludes by stating that he wrote to the Guardian telling them he would be willing to replace both Cohen and Owen Jones for half their salaries. His offer was unsurprisingly rejected.

A picture of the man himself from Greenstein’s article. If you can’t read the caption, it says, ‘The worst thing about all the Fascists, charlatans and liars running the Leave campaign is all the bloody name calling! To which Greenstein adds a caption saying that he lacks a certain self-awareness.

Private Eye is therefore publishing highly biased pieces, which could well be considered defamatory – Greenstein said that the only reason he isn’t suing him is because he was already suing the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, and has the Jewish Chronicle and a certain unnamed councillor in his sights – by someone who fully supported and promoted an unprovoked, illegal war. A war that was really wages solely for the enrichment of predatory western multinationals and the American-Saudi oil industry. A war that has left a million dead and seven million displaced in the Middle East, quite apart from the carnage Greenstein describes in the passage quoted above.

But there, no source is apparently too low and no lie too vile in the media’s determination to oust Corbyn.

Just as the Jewish Chronicle may have itself been guilty of anti-Semitism by denying that one of the signatories to the letter of support for Corbyn and the Labour party sent to the Sunday Times, so other members of the right may also be aiding anti-Semitism by their repeated use of the conspiracy theory that the Jews are the real force behind capitalism.

Three days ago, on 16th March 2019, David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group, an ardent campaigner himself against racism, anti-Semitism and thus Zionism, put up on his blog an article discussing this very point, which had been published that day in the Morning Star. He began by commenting on the statement by Blairite Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh to John Humphrys on Radio 4 that ‘anti-capitalist politics are at the root of anti-Semitism’. Rosenberg states that it’s an appalling slur against everyone fighting against the poverty and inequality of Tory Britain, but it also revealed that the Right, even those, who think they are pro-Jewish, still believe anti-Semitic stereotypes, as McDonagh obviously thinks that Jews are rich capitalists.

He goes on to discuss how this is at the heart of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that sees the Jews as using their wealth to control the banks and governments. A theory that was pushed by Henry Ford, an Episcopalian Christian and founder of the car manufacturer that bears his name, in his paper the Dearborn Independent. Ford believed that the Jews caused World War I, and published the infamous Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And someone else who believed this poisonous nonsense, and was Ford’s biggest fan in Europe, was one A. Hitler.

Rosenberg goes on to discuss how there are Jews, who identify the Jewish community with capitalism, banking and property and so accuse the anti-capitalist left as anti-Semites. He then cites Richard Mather, who claimed in an article in the Jerusalem Post that ‘the Labour party’s call for the seizure of property’ was part of ‘anti-Semitic class warfare’, and pieces written by the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, and one of his journos, Alex Brummer, who both claimed that Corbyn was an anti-Semitic threat to Jewish capitalists, with Pollard harking back to Corbyn’s attack on the bankers that caused the financial crash ten years ago. Rosenberg tweeted in response to this nonsense that of Pollard and Corbyn, one of them thought all bankers were Jews. And it wasn’t Corbyn.

He reinforces this point by describing how Arnold Brown, a Jewish comedian, who came from a poor background in Glasgow, tore up the floorboards at his home one day after the other schoolkids told him that all Jews were rich. He also makes the point that the racist Right use the stereotype of the rich Jewish capitalist to divert popular anger away from capitalism to particular Jewish figures, who are supposed to be responsible for its ills, such as Rothschild and Goldman Sachs to George Soros today, demonised by Trump and a slew of extreme right-wing regimes because he funds agencies for migrants and refugees and anti-government demonstrations.

But he also makes the point that this stereotype also erases the strong history of Jewish left-wing anti-capitalist activism, writing

When McDonagh, Mather and Pollard repeat stereotypes of Jews as capitalists, they not only feed these conspiracy theories, but also erase an outstanding tradition of Jewish anti-capitalism. People know the famous Jewish revolutionaries, like Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemberg, Emma Goldman, but it was in mass Jewish workers’ movements such as the Bund, and among the Jews so numerous in socialist and communist parties over the last 120 years, that anti-capitalism was ingrained. In 1902, a Russian Jewish bookbinder, Semyon Ansky, wrote a Yiddish song to honour the Bund’s struggles for social justice. The movement adopted it as its anthem. One powerful verse translates as:

“We swear to the heavens a bloody hatred against those who murder and rob the working class. The Tsar, the rulers, the capitalists – we swear that they will all be devastated and destroyed. An oath, an oath, of life and death.”

He goes on to say that he is going that day to march and speak with the Jewish Socialist Group on a national demonstration in London against racism and Fascism, including the anti-Semitism that is rising in central and eastern Europe and Trump’s America with the Pittsburgh shooting. He concludes

At street level, far right organisations concentrate physical attacks more frequently on Muslims, Roma, migrants and refugees, but when they want to explain to their supporters who they believe holds power in the world they fall back on Jewish conspiracy theories as surely today as they did in the 1930s. The fight against antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-migrant propaganda are absolutely linked and we must combat them together.

Absolutely. Rosenberg’s blog is particularly fascinating for the pieces he publishes about the Bund, the socialist party of the eastern European masses in the Russian Empire. It’s a history that I doubt many non-Jews know about, as the Yiddish-speaking communities the Bund represented were murdered by the Nazis. If people outside the Jewish community know about it at all, it’s probably because of the movement’s connection to the Russian Socialist movement. The Bund were, with the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, part of the Russian Social Democratic Party, the parent organisation of the Russian Communists. It was their withdrawal from the party conference in 1909, when Lenin demanded that there should be no separate organisation for Jewish socialists, that made the Bolsheviks the majority faction and gave them their name, from ‘Bolshe’, the Russian word for bigger.

But the articles by David Rosenberg and other left-wing Jewish bloggers and vloggers reveal a rich, lost history of Jewish anti-capitalist struggle. One of the remarkable consequences of the anti-Semitism smears is that this history is being rediscovered and brought to public attention as Jewish Marxists and socialists refute these smears. Jon Pullman’s film, The Witchhunt, attacking these smears and particularly the libelous hounding of Jackie Walker, includes a brief mention of the Bund, including black and white footage of their demonstrations and banners. If Channel 4 had kept to its original charter as an alternative BBC 2, the Bund and its legacy would be a very suitable subject for a documentary. It could also easily be screened on BBC 4. But I doubt that this will ever happen because the stereotype of the rich Jew is too important a weapon against the anti-capitalist left for it to be refuted by such a thing as actual history.

And if left-wing Jewish history, like that of the Bund, is being forgotten, some contemporary works on the Jewish community may inadvertently reinforce the stereotype of the rich Jew. Back in the 1990s an aunt gave me a book about the Jewish community in Britain, The Club. It was a mainstream book by a very respectable mainstream publisher, but from what I can remember about it, it was about the elite section of British Jewish society, the top 100. I think it was written from an entirely praiseworthy standpoint – to celebrate Jewish achievement, and to how how integrated and indeed integral Jews were to British society and culture. But books like it can give an unbalanced picture of Jewish society in Britain by concentrating on the immensely wealthy and successful, and ignoring the ordinary Jewish folk, who live, work and whose kids go to school and uni with the rest of us, and whose working people marched in solidarity with us.

It’s fascinating and necessary that the history of Jewish socialism is being rediscovered, and that activists in the Bund’s tradition, like Rosenberg, continue to write, demonstrate and blog against racism and anti-Semitism as part of the real struggle by working people.

Oh ho! Mike today posted a very interesting article about two letters written by Jewish supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party, which the anti-Semitism witch-hunters will definitely not like.

One was written to the Groaniad by 200 Jewish ladies, who were angered by the formerly left-wing newspaper’s unqualified support of Margaret Hodge. Hodge was disappointed that so few people have been charged with anti-Semitism, as she personally had denounced 200 people. They pointed out that of 111 people she had accused, only 20 were actually members of the Labour party. The other 91 were nothing to do with the party’s disciplinary procedure and her complaints against them were a waste of the party’s time.

They also said that her other claims – that the party should shut down those branches which had expressed loyalty to Chris Williamson, or refused to adopt the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism should be similarly treated as suspect. They supported Williamson’s statement that the party had been too apologetic in its treatment of the anti-Semitism accusations, and stated that the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism had been shredded by two QCS and the Jewish human rights specialist, Sir Geoffrey Bindman, and the Jewish retired appealed court judge, Stephen Sedley. Their letter concludes

All signatories to this letter grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. We know we must maintain eternal vigilance against antisemitic resurgence. But we also celebrate our Jewishness, especially the disputatiousness (pace our aphorism: two Jews three opinions) central to Jewish identity. We are terrified by Margaret Hodge’s attempt to hijack our history and rewrite our identity and by unwillingness to investigate, fact check and challenge her allegations.

The Groaniad refused to print the letter, on the grounds that it didn’t say anything new. So two Jewish Labour ladies, Naomi Wayner and Leah Levane, one of whom was a signatory to the letter, published an article about it and the text of the letter in the Prole Star.

Mike comments that this means that probably more people will see it and read it than if it had been published by the paper.

The Sunday Times, when of the offenders in the media smears of decent people as anti-Semites, also printed a letter by 12 Holocaust survivors. They state that they don’t believe the party is perpetrating any hostility or prejudice towards Jews, and if it is, it is minimal, and no more prevalent than in any other party. And rather than considering Jeremy Corbyn a threat, they say he has been over backwards for Jews.

They also state

Media attention on the Labour Party in general, and on Corbyn in particular, is being generated by anti-Labour and anti-Corbyn mischief makers, who unfortunately are over-represented within the so-called Anglo-Jewish leadership — a leadership whose legitimacy is not recognised by the mainstream Haredi (strictly Orthodox) Jews.

The Jewish Chronicle, a paper with a proud future behind it, has criticised the letter, and in particularly claimed that the authors or somehow connected to Shraga Stern, the Orthodox Jew, who appeared in a photo with Corbyn during his visit to Finsbury Park mosque. The paper also claimed that the rabbis who signed an earlier letter of support for Corbyn didn’t know what they were signing. According to the Skwawkbox, both claims have been thoroughly refuted. See:

Mike also notes that the film Witchhunt, about the persecution of anti-Zionists and Corbyn supporters within the Labour party, has just been released. He hasn’t seen it yet, but encourages everyone to do so. He ends his article

The mainstream – the ‘establishment’ – will try hard to regain the initiative; we have seen one attempt already in the response of the Jewish Chronicle. The best advice you can take is to use your own intelligence and make up your own mind, based on the evidence available and the reliability of those providing it.

I’m surprised that the Sunset Times published the article by Holocaust survivors, but perhaps they were afraid of the bad press they’d get if they didn’t. As Jewish bloggers like Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni and David Rosenberg have pointed out, Orthodox Jews are not represented by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and don’t recognise the Chief Rabbi. And I suspect that Haredi Judaism of some of the signatories may well also be embarrassing to some of the witchhunters. According to a recent article by Shaun Lawson, a liberal Zionist, witchhunter Jonathan Hoffman tried to shut down Jewish supporters of Corbyn with a questionnaire asking them about how Jewish they were in terms of synagogue attendance, activity within the Jewish community, adherence to the Jewish purity laws and Torah, and so on. He had to abandon this approach. From what I gather, the Haredi are a Jewish revival movement, who call Orthodox Jews into a full observance of the Mosaic Law. Which means that there can be absolutely no question about their Jewishness, not that Hoffman’s wretched questionnaire could ever quantify that and the merest suggestion that it could is ridiculous. The Jewish community is divided in its adherence to the Law, from the very strict – the Orthodox and the Haredi, to the less so, like Reform Jews. But all of them view themselves as devout Jews, just as I’ve no doubt the third of the community that is secular also do not deny or are ashamed of their heritage.

As for Shraga Stern, who the Jewish Chronicle seems to believe was somehow involved in persuading the Holocaust survivors to write their letter, he has also received a threatening message because of his appearance with Corbyn, just like Mrs Manson. Is the Jewish Chronicle trying to stir up more hatred against him through its article?

I’m sure Mike’s right that further attacks will come, especially as Survation has put Labour five points ahead of the Tories. But with claims like anti-Semitism, you do have to exercise proper scepticism and critical thinking. You have to ask what the issues really are behind the article, who is writing it, and what they are not telling you.

And now from one Australian Fascist, Senator Fraser Anning, to another, a home-grown one: ‘Hatey’ Katie Hopkins. Zelo Street yesterday posted a long article commenting on a nasty piece Hopkins had put up on Facebook, stating that people should not feel sorry the victims of mosque shootings in New Zealand, because they were Muslims, and we were at war with a religion trying to replace us.

The Sage of Crewe gives a few, pungent quotes from Hopkins’ keyboard, beginning with this one.

“A war for the world is underway. And watching the media, the mouthpieces and the multitudes desperate in their search to be the most sorry, I fear that the sad truth none of us want to face is that the victor has already been declared”

She goes on to voice her feelings of pity for Fraser Anning, and deride everyone who sympathised with the victims as pathetic, before claiming that the media has been singled out for blame for this atrocity by the media. Zelo Street states that this is simply untrue. She then goes on to say that the police told us that the real danger was islamophobia after every islamist terror attack in the UK. Which isn’t true either. She then says that after this attack on a mosque by a white bloke, the real enemy is once again islamophobia, and that whatever the terror, the real problem is islamophobia. She then talks about Muslims killing Christians in Nigeria, ISIS bombing a Roman Catholic cathedral, and so, as Zelo Street says, to tell us all that it’s really all Islam’s fault and we are not to feel sorry for the victims.

And then she goes full Enoch Powell with the words about the truth behind the violence

“You can’t see it, can’t hear it, can’t witness it – because you are not allowed. It can’t be recognised without fear of arrest. You can’t talk about the problems of conflicting cultures. Of being threatened by one religion, seeming determined to take over all that was once ours … the future is grim. People are desperately unhappy and feel lost. Forced out from within, strangers in their own lands, separated by fear. On both sides, all sides”.

Zelo Street comments very succinctly that this is White Genocide and the Great Replacement.

She goes on “We are sitting on a volcano, the hot lava of anger forced down by the constant suppression of our words, repression of our emotions, policing of our thoughts. Controlled by blatant lies”.

There was no announcement over a cracking radio. No Churchillian speech to rally us. But the silent exodus of Jews from Europe, of Christians in Britain looking Eastwards for a new place to call home, makes us refugees all the same.”

“And watching the media, its mouthpieces and the multitudes desperate in their search to be the most sorry, waving their white flags in advance, shutting their Churches and Synagogues in deference to the Mosque, I fear that the sad truth none of us want to face is that the victor has already been declared”.

Zelo Street comments

In the world of Katie Hopkins, we should not show empathy for the victims, because she is convinced that Muslims don’t show it to the victims of Islamist attacks, so we should behave in that way too – except, of course, that she is making that bit up. It allows her to conclude that by showing that empathy, we have shown “deference” – her term – to Islam, and therefore that in her imaginary war of cultures, Islam has been victorious.

He goes on to make the point that no-one is suppressing Hopkins’ speech or her thoughts, or is going to arrest anyone who shares her views. But she has to shape her narrative like that in order to push her paranoid, White supremacist fears. He concludes

It is a continuation of the story arc piloted by the likes of Enoch Powell. Then, it was simply about frightening Britons about brown and black people. Now it is about religion, too. But it is still racism, still bigotry, still hatred, and it is still wrong.

The reality is that most people want to end the hatred. Katie Hopkins does not, as it is in her interest for it to continue. She will not prevail. That is all.

What really chills the blood is that Hopkins’ sentiments are very similar to those expressed by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the architect of the Holocaust, in a speech he made to his ranks of mass murderers calling for them not to have any sympathy for the peoples they were to kill – Czechs, Russians and Jews – in order to safeguard the German race.

The speech is quoted in the chapter on Himmler in The Face of the Third Reich by Joachim C. Fest (London: Penguin 1970). I give it here for comparison with Hatey Katie’s words.

It is absolutely wrong to project you own harmless soul with its deep feelings, our kindheartedness, our idealism, upon alien peoples. This is true, beginning with Herder, who must have been drunk when he wrote the Voices of the Peoples, thereby bringing such immeasurable suffering and misery upon us who came after him. This is true, beginning with the Czechs and Slovenes, to whom we brought their sense of nationhood. They themselves were incapable of it, but we invented it for them.

One principle must be absolute for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to no one else. What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me. Such good blood of our own kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves, if necessary by taking away the children and bringing them up among us. Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; apart from that it does not interest me. Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany. We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary; that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them to bring them ideals.

I shall speak to you with the full frankness of a very serious subject. We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things which it is easy to say. ‘The Jewish people is to be exterminated,’ says every party member. ‘That’s clear, it’s part of our programme, elimination of the Jews, extermination, right, we’ll do it.’ And then they all come along, the eighty million good Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew. Of all those who talk like this, not one has watched, not one has stood up to it. Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet – apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness – to have remained decent, this has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and never shall be written. (pp. 177-8)

Okay, Hopkins isn’t Himmler and she isn’t standing in Auschwitz urging troops forward as they beat, butcher and gas innocents in their millions, all the while preaching a twisted morality that salutes the atrocity as somehow decent, even noble. But this is where such sentiments end up. And as you can see from the above, it wasn’t just the Jews, but also the Slavs – the Russians, the Czech, the Slovenes in the above speech, but also the Poles, Ukrainians and others. Hitler himself said of the Czechs that the Germans should be utterly ruthless with them, as ‘it’s either us or them’.

Hopkins words are sick and dangerous. They come from a woman who has declared that we should fire on immigrant boats. I don’t know how serious she is about all this. She’s a troll, who feeds on the hatred she gets for upsetting decent people with her obscene views. She might even by like Himmler himself, who, for all his tough talk, was personally squeamish when it came to the Nazis’ murder. In one famous story, he was attending an execution by firing squad. The unit failed to kill their victims with their first salvo, and they had to fire again. Himmler shrieked, and had to be carried off hysterical. It wouldn’t surprise me if, decent her thuggish comments, Hopkins would behave like that herself if she personally had to witness people carrying out the mass murder of immigrants. She’d almost certainly say that she never meant people to start the mass killing of Muslims and immigrants.

But this is where Hopkins’ words can all too easily end up. And that’s no stupid piece of trolling.

Here’s an inspiring story. Fraser Anning, an utterly repugnant far-right Australian senator, who literally blamed the victims of the Christchurch massacre for their own murder, got his just comeuppance. As he was speaking, a White kid hit him over the head with an egg. And the lad is now an internet hero.

The story’s covered by the I, whose article in today’s edition for 18th March 2019, on page 9, runs

Online accolades for boy who egged far-right senator

Will Connolly, the 17 year old boy who egged the far-right Australian senator Fraser Anning, has become an online hero.

Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison suggested yesterday that the anti-Muslim senator should be charged after he slapped a teenager who cracked a raw egg over his head.

Mr Anning has been condemned for blaming Muslim immigration for the racist attacks on two New Zealand mosques. Mr Morrison said: “The full force of the law should be applied to Senator Anning.”

Posting on after the mass shootings on Friday, Mr Anning tweeted: “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?”

“The real cause of the bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration programe which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place, ” he said later. A GoFundMe page set up to raise A$2,000 (£1,0000) to pay for Connolly’s ‘legal fees’ and ‘more eggs’ had exceeded A$25,000 yesterday.

The site says most of the money will go to Christchurch victims.

The I’s columnist Eleanor Margolis wrote a further piece about, When words fail, some people need egging, adding a bit of historical context to Eggboy’s act. She mentions the egging of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jeremy Corbyn at Finsbury Park mosque last week, and John Prescott, how it was used against people in the stocks in the Middle Ages, and by less than impressed audiences in Elizabethan theatres. She said of Eggboy’s strike against Anning that

For anyone slating Eggboy for food wastage, maybe supermarkets should start keeping the eggs that pass their sell by date specifically to see to people with grievances against our leaders. Becuase the thing about egging is, it’s sort of effective. When Eggboy matter-of-factly broke that egg on Fraser Anning’s racist head, millions of people soon saw a display of solidarity -from a White non-Muslim kid – with those impacted by the Christchurch shooting and the victims of today’s rampant islamophobia in general. When words fail, some people just need an egg to the face. It’s probably the most physical, yet mostly non-violent, way of showing the world you disagree with someone and their entire schtick. (p. 18)

Let’s add a bit more detail to this. Anning didn’t just blame Muslim immigration for the violence, he specifically suggested that the victims of this atrocity were themselves violent and to blame for it. He issued a statement essentially saying that Islam is a violent religion, all Muslims were violent, and the massacre victims were ‘not armed yet’. Very many religions and ideologies, including Christianity, have their violent as well as peaceful aspects, and Islam is no different. At times it has expanded through military conquest and at others through peaceful preaching and simply commercial interaction. It’s believed that Islam spread into sub-Saharan African, for example, through merchants, and that many of the African peoples, who adopted it did so because the majlis, or assembly of religious scholars, offered a constitutional check to the power of the kings. It’s also obviously untrue that Muslims are violent, as clearly shown by the peaceful behaviour of the vast majority. And Anning’s statement about the victims of the massacre is both wrong and obscene. They weren’t armed at all, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that they were going to be.

Kevin Logan dealt with this lie in his livestream he did with feminist professor Kristi Winters. It’s on YouTube, entitled ‘We Love You Kiwis’. I haven’t reblogged it, because it’s over an hour long and Logan, as an internet atheist, makes a series of gratuitous attacks on Christianity. But on a more positive note, he did post this video celebrating Anning’s nemesis. Enjoy!

Warning: Contains language.

Margolis’ article is also interesting for how she describes the attack on Corbyn. She repeats the falsehood that he was hit with an egg – he wasn’t. He was punched in the head. But she admits he was attacked by a racist. Which is interesting, as this is a tacit admission that Corbyn isn’t. And if he isn’t a racist, he can’t be an anti-Semite, by definition. But I doubt you’ll find the I going that far to buck the anti-Semitism witch-hunt against Labour.

We got the news today that, at lunch time New Zealand time, gun men shot the worshippers at two mosques over there, killing men, women and children. There are 49 dead, and many more wounded. Two men and a woman have been arrested. One of them is an Australian White supremacist. It’s particularly shocking as I understand that, while New Zealand has its problems with violent crime same as everywhere else, it’s largely quiet and peaceful compared with some other nations. I can remember talking to an elderly gentleman in my part of south Bristol, who was preparing to leave to join relatives out there. He said he was impressed with the humanity of the place. It’s still a country where neighbours greet and talk to each other, And now sadly racist, islamophobic violence has hit that nation too.

The good fellow at Crewe, who posts the Zelo Street blog, has put up a really good piece not only condemning the violence, and putting it in the context of the other massacres caused by Fascist maniacs – Anders Breivik at Utoya, the rabid anti-Semite who attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and the other bigots and racists who gun down and murder Jews, Muslims and gays, including children. He also points the finger at those, whose own politics and rhetoric of hate have helped to inspire such atrocities: the right-wing press. He makes the point that this hate long ago went beyond the extreme right-wing fringe, and discusses the extreme right-wing figures, from Donald Trump, Milo Yiannopolis and the Alt Right, to Tories like Boris Johnson. All of whom will claim that their venomous hatred of Muslims and minorities had nothing to do with these outrages. And he says very strongly that none of them can escape their responsibility for these events. He writes

It is an industry that does not exist in a vacuum: as with any malignant virus, once incubated, it has to spread if it is to have any effect. And here, our free and fearless press, and even our broadcast media, should hang their heads in shame, although they will not. They have published the hate merchants, given platforms to bigots, encouraged the demonisation of minorities, all for the momentary interest of profit and ratings.

Moreover, it is not just fringe media that has spread the virus of hatred. It long ago went beyond Breitbart, InfoWars and Rush Limbaugh. Now it has been transmitted by Fox News Channel, the Murdoch Sun, the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, the Express, the Spectator and others. Yet the management of those media outlets are not responsible for the end product of the hatred they enable. Nor are the figureheads of the hate movement.

Well, I have news for this collective stain on humanity, this repellent convocation of amateur human beings, this vicious cohort of hate preachers. Don’t think any or all of you can duck responsibility for what happened in Christchurch. You cannot. This is where your ignorance, hatred and bigotry leads. This is the fruit of your ill thought out labours.

Damn you. Damn every last miserable, hate-filled, bigoted, snivelling, cowardly, intolerant, selfish, worthless, uncaring one of you. Damn you all to hell.

It’s only a couple of days after the horrific attack by White supremacists on the mosques in New Zealand. The country’s in mourning, and decent people around the world are united with the victims in their shock and grief. But even as we see the pictures of the tearful survivors and their communities, and the Kiwi PM herself paying their tributes to the victims, the Nazis have started to come back out of the woodwork.

Zelo Street has today put up a piece reporting the vile comments in Belgium by Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley Lennon, formerly of the BNP, previous founder and supremo of the EDL and one of the leading figures of Pegida UK, before they got rid of him. After losing his court case against Cambridgeshire police for harassment, discrimination and human rights abuses, Robinson had gone to Belgium for a conference on Free Speech. He gave an interview stating that NGOs in Britain were working to suppress freedom of expression, and that simply stating you were opposed to islamicisation would get you sacked.

Zelo Street here helpfully points out that this is a reference to the case of one Tom Dupre, a merchant banker, who was revealed by Hope Not Hate to be the-then leader of the Fascist group, Generation Identity. This was why he was sacked by his employers, Standard Chartered. But of course, Robinson didn’t mention his membership of this malevolent organisation when alluding to his case in his wretched video attacking the Panorama investigation into him.

But this wasn’t all Robinson said. He carried on, saying like him were being beaten and persecuted in order to make an example of them to the rest of the population, who should put up with it all and not complain about the authorities decision to replace them with mass Muslim immigration. The interviewer rightly said that this was the ‘White Genocide’ theory. Which was promptly hotly denied by Robinson, who said he didn’t have a White Genocide theory, as he wasn’t talking about Whites, only Muslims.

But Zelo Street points out that the ‘Great Replacement’ is part of the ‘White Genocide’ theory, held by Fascist groups like Generation Identity, whose leading European figure, Martin Sellner, and his girlfriend, Britanny Pettibone, are friends of Robinson’s.

Zelo Street’s article concludes

And there was Stephen Lennon promoting the White Genocide conspiracy theory – except he wasn’t quite doing that. Because he didn’t say “white”. It was all about Islamisation, and in his world, Islam is not a race and so he can’t really be racist.

He talks like a racist, and acts like a racist. But he isn’t a racist. So don’t call him one.

There’s a nasty anti-Semitic element to these theories about the ‘Great Replacement’ and ‘White Genocide’, as the people conspiring in these warped theories to import great numbers of non-Whites to destroy and replace the White population are there Jews. It’s simply another mutant form of the old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that the Jews are out to enslave the White race through Communism, capitalism and racial intermixing.

I am not accusing Robinson of anti-Semitism. He didn’t mention the Jews in this rant, just as he didn’t mention skin colour, only Islam. And Robinson has been perfectly happy to march around with the JDL and there was even a Jewish division within the EDL. In the video that was leaked to the press of him confessing to buying cocaine and calling taxi drivers ‘little Pakis’, Robinson said that he’d fight for Israel if there was a war between that country and the Palestinians. Who are, of course, that country’s indigenous inhabitants, who are being colonised and forced out by settlers from Europe and America.

But the anti-Semitic origins and connections of the ‘Great Replacement’ and ‘White Genocide’ theories still need to be mentioned and stressed. Because the attacks on people of colour almost inevitably lead back to attacks on the Jews. Whoever it’s directed at, ultimately the theory is part and parcel of the same racist, Fascist nonsense.

People have just been killed because of this poisonous nonsense. But Robinson and co. are still pushing it.

This is another story from Tim Fenton over at Zelo Street, and it’s absolutely unbelievable. Just as the world was in shock and mourning for the 49 Muslim lives lost and the many more wounded at the hands of Fascist gunmen in Christchurch, New Zealand, the Beeb decided to get the views of the other side of the incident on Newsnight. They invited on Benjamin Jones, the leader of Generation Identity UK. Zelo Street then quotes Wikipedia to show why they’re considered a Fascist organization.

According to the Wikipedia article, Generation Identity have gone in for such racist stunts as distrusting soup containing pork in order to exclude Jews and Muslims, and in 2018 Facebook banned them for hate speech and extremist content. In December that year, Al-Jazeera broadcast another documentary, Undercover Hate, in which one of their journo infiltrated Generation Identity, and secretly filmed them racially abusing and attacking immigrants in Lille, calling for violence against Muslims, and which alleged they had contacts with the Front National.

Zelo Street then gives a series of tweets from rightly angry members of the public wondering what got into the Beeb’s heads. One of them, Tom Kibasi, demanded answer from Esme Wren, the programme’s editor, and said he would be putting in a complaint. Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar also complained, and said that it showed how disposable Muslim lives were to the Beeb. She also said she didn’t recall ISIS being given a chance to speak on Newsnight after the Manchester bombing. But Waqas Tufail did remember how Newsnight had on Anjem Chaudhury, the Islamist extremist, after the murder of Lee Rigby, and complained that some things don’t change.

The article concludes

Is Newsnight trying too hard to be a bit edgy? Is this the current idea of balance at the programme? Someone isn’t engaging brain first. And that’s not good enough.

This once again raises the question of bias on the Beeb. I can remember a decade or so ago when it seemed Nick Griffin and the BNP were about to make their final breakthrough into British politics. The Beeb caused uproar then when they invited him on to Question Time. And Buddy Hell over at Guy Debord’s cat has consistently argued that the television producers are softer on their treatment of the Far Right than they are with the left, inviting leading figures in the National Front and even Oswald Mosley onto their programmes to be interviewed. The Beeb’s argument in these cases is that it has duty to represent all forms of opinion across the spectrum. A case is also made that by bringing Fascists on to television and interrogated, they can be shown for what they are and their appeal tackled and undermined. The argument against that is simply that they are being given a platform to disseminate their vile views.

There’s also more than just a whiff of hypocrisy here. The Beeb has joined the rest of the media in its smearing of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party as anti-Semites. But to my knowledge absolutely none of those smeared – Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Cyril Chilson, Martin Odoni, Mike Sivier, Marc Wadsworth and so on – have been invited onto any mainstream news or current affairs show to present their side. As far as I know, the only news networks that have were the alternative media, like RT, which had both Livingstone and Walker on, if I recall correctly. And I’m not surprised, because if they really allowed Leninspart, Walker and co. to speak, it would show how utterly shallowed and false these accusations are.

And so we have the serious injustice that genuine anti-racists are debarred from appearing on television because of utterly false accusations of Jew-hatred, while the real racists are given a platform after those, who share the views commit horrific acts of violence.

This shows that there is something very, very wrong with mainstream, and particularly BBC news. It is no longer fit for purpose.

Mike today has put up a piece about the vile, abusive message sent to Jenny Manson, the chair of Jewish Voice for Labour. Unlike the Zionist hate group, the Jewish Labour Movement, this is a group that represents all Jews and members have to be members of the Labour party. Unlike the JLM, where they don’t have to be either. The JVL supports Jeremy Corbyn, and like Jewdas and other Jewish groups, it points out what the lamestream media and the establishment really don’t want people hearing: that Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite and has always been supportive of Jews. Indeed, 21 rabbis wrote and signed a letter about this last year.

Manson was on Newsnight last week defending Jeremy Corbyn, and I gather that she has also been on two other programmes as well doing the same. This was too much for one member of the public, who stalked her and left an abusive message on her phone. The anonymous caller calls her ‘Nazi scum’ and says that he wishes she burns ‘in the gas oven’ and ‘burns in hell in acid’. She has also said that she is regularly stopped in the street by aggressive individuals, angered at her support for Labour.

Mike in his article states that it seems to him that this is exactly what the witchhunters want. He mentions that this week Jeremy Corbyn was punched in the head by someone angry about his stance on Brexit, and wonders how long it will be before someone is physically attacked or worse by the supporters of the anti-Semitism witchhunt.

He speculates about what they would say if caught, and who they would claim had incited them to it. Mike states that it’s time the people stirring up this hatred were held to account. He concludes

Next time they make unfounded accusations, perhaps we should lodge complaints against them under the Public Order Act – fear or provocation of violence.

The Skwawkbox also has another story about an Orthodox Jewish man, Shraga Stern, who was abused because he appeared with Jeremy Corbyn in a photograph taken at Finsbury Park Mosque commemorating the terrorist attack there last year. The message wasn’t as vitriolic as that directed at Manson. It just said ‘You appeared with Corbyn. Shame on you. Be careful’.

I don’t know if the people leaving these obscene messages are Jewish. Quite honestly, given some of the weird characters in organisations like Sussex Friends of Israel and North West Friends of Israel, they could well be gentiles. One Jewish anti-Zionist described some of the bizarre, twisted members of one of these group. One of them was a bloke, who claims to be an Orthodox Jew, despite the fact that he is very obviously not. But unfortunately, this kind of abuse is no aberration, whether it is hurled by Jews or gentiles. Tony Greenstein has described on his blog how he has received messages from Zionist Jews telling him that they wished he and his family had died in the Shoah, the Holocaust. He was also physically assaulted in Brighton by a Jewish American. To add insult to injury, Greenstein was himself arrested following this attack, though released without charge. And one of the videos for Jackie Walker’s one-woman performance about her unjust suspension from the Labour party on a fake charge of anti-Semitism included her reading out some of the vile hate messages she got. And they were absolutely horrific. She was called a ‘court Jew’ – the Jewish equivalent of the Black slur ‘house n***er’. She was also told, amongst other threats, that she should be lynched. As the video of her performance shows, this is especially horrific because her mother was an American civil rights activist, at a time when Blacks were really being lynched.

From the descriptions of their behaviour on a number of Jewish blogs, not just Greenstein’s, it’s very clear that the Zionist groups who turn up to protest events criticising Israel are very aggressive. They scream, shout, sneer and giggle at description of the IDF killing Palestinian children. They will also try to block the entrances into the venue where the event is being held. If flyers and leaflets are being handed out, they will try to snatch them from the grasp of the ordinary members of the public who ask for them. They also hobnob with members of the islamophobic mainstream Fascist right, like Britain First. The Israel lobby will also demonstrate with members of the Jewish Defence League and idiots wearing T-shirts supporting Kach, a far-right Israeli terror group. Given this, it seems to me that it may only be a matter of time before someone from these Fascist organisations takes out their rage physically on an innocent person, whose only crime is to be a Jewish supporter of Jeremy Corbyn.

As for the anti-Semitic abuse hurled by Zionists at non-Zionist or Israel-critical Jews, this goes back a long way. A week or so ago I posted up a piece about how the language Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, used about diaspora Jews in his Das Judenstaat mirrored and prefigured Nazi and Fascist rhetoric. Herzl described contemporary diaspora Jews as ‘Yids’, who were small, dark, cringing and ugly, in contrast to the strong, proud, beautiful Hebrews who would arise with the new Jewish state. Alfred Kepel, in his book on the rise of Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism, The Revenge of God, also talks about the bitter feelings Zionists have towards non-Zionist Jews. Many Zionist partly blamed the non-Zionist Jewish organisations in eastern Europe for the Holocaust, arguing that more Jews could have been saved if they’d encouraged them to emigrate to Israel. It’s a highly questionable assertion. Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of the Hungarian Zionists during the Second World War, struck a deal with the Nazis, in which tens of thousands of ordinary Jews were sent to the death camps in return for a minority being sent to Israel. It’s also been argued that what stopped Israel suffering the same fate as European Jewry was Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein. If the Nazi forces had broken through, then they would have occupied Palestine and murdered its Jewish inhabitants. Amongst the rhetoric Zionists use against their non-Zionist fellows, according to Kepel, is casting them as ‘Yids’, capering for the entertainment of their gentile, aristocratic lords. I think this is a literary trope, but it is obviously part of the accusation that non- or anti-Zionist Jews like Jackie Walker are ‘court Jews’.

It seems to me very strongly that the ugly abuse Jenny Manson and Shraga Stern have suffered is part of the racist, anti-Semitic rhetoric of Zionist fanatics.

And Mike is absolutely correct. It may well only be a matter of time before one of these fanatics takes it further, and physically attacks or kills a decent, self-respecting Jew, because as a Corbyn supporter they have to be ‘Nazi scum’ or a ‘court Jew’. Quite apart from the non-Jewish opponents of anti-Semitism and racism, who have suffered the same abuse.

It’s time to halt the racism by calling it what it is: hate speech, incitement to racial hatred and incitement to violence.